Don’t Dribble on Behance

As a designer nowadays, there are many networking platforms out there that allow you to show and present your work, however Behance and Dribbble seem to be the most popular platforms. I have used both of them for a number of years now and have observed, as I’m sure other design folk have that one is acting as a digital environment that allows designers to present their process and portfolio. The other is somewhat acting as a showcase for a ‘what you’re working on right now!’ screenshot, in which other designers can ‘like’ or comment on.

As a brief overview of what they are and what they do:

Behance (part of the Adobe family) is a portfolio style network. You can add projects, people can like, share and follow your profile. It’s a free service and can be used by anyone with a creative bone to present final work.

Dribbble is an invite only community that urges users to post screenshots of current projects, users can critique and comment on other designer’s work.

Since using both of these platforms, I tend to find that with Dribbble I have a constant frustration with how the community works. Rather than being an honest and ‘straight to the point’ critique of a designer’s work, it is just a popularity contest that results in users leaving comments on mediocre work such as

“Great work”

“Love your work!”

My main concern with this kind website is that “THIS ISN”T HOW THE REAL WORLD WORKS!”. If you went to a creative director with a piece of work that wasn’t up to par he/she wouldn’t say “Fantastic Job!”, they would carefully look for the issues with the work in order to improve it.

A lot of people on Dribbble are designing for other designers, not to solve a problem or answer a brief. It can be a great source of inspiration but as a service that designer’s actually receive work requests from, it seems crazy that a designer/company could be hired by a client just by a range of 300×400 screenshots.

“I guess my main issue is that having a Dribbble account doesn’t necessarily mean you are solving real problems for clients. It simply means that you’ve created something that appeals to another designer or even worse, you were able to grab an invite from someone you know who just had some leftovers.There is essentially zero correlation between having a Dribbble account and actually being a quality designer.”  

–  Nicole Dominguez
Frontend developer, New York

I would hope that there are some users out there and I have seen a few that give honest feedback on a users work.  At the end of the day a designer’s skill should not be judged on how many dribbble followers they have, it should be based on case studies of projects and how you creatively solve problems or approach a brief.

In my opinion, all designers should seek towards Behance as a platform for discussion and honest appraisal, maybe just see dribbble as a inspiration network rather than the twitter of the design world. Design for the real world and everyone will appreciate your work rather than just other designers